Early modern Germany Research Papers (original) (raw)

This article traces the pictorial lineages of images collected in one of the two Thun-Hohenstein albums through comparative analyses of fight books produced in the German-speaking lands, and considers how the representational strategies deployed in martial treatises inflected the ways that book painters and their audiences visualized the armoured body.

The article discusses the handwritten revisions and drawn additions by Albrecht Dürer in his own copy of the treatise on geometry, Underweysung der Messung (1525). Situating Dürer’s interest in mathematics within the scholarly milieu of Renaissance Nuremberg, the article addresses the shifts in style and content that Dürer proscribes and offers new perspectives on the artist’s relation to his own late work. The article concludes by displaying several drawings bound into the edition by Dürer that illustrate variations on perspectival apparatuses. These lesser known drawings illuminate the evolution of Dürer’s conceptualization of the dynamics between artist and subject, as well as the tools used to facilitate this interaction.

- by Noam Andrews
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- Print Culture, History of Mathematics, History of the Book, Renaissance Studies
- by Renate Dürr
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- Early Modern History, Enlightenment, History of Missions, Early modern Germany
- by Hillay Zmora
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- Early modern Germany

This article provides hitherto unpublished information about the lives of the
men who translated Caspar Brulow’s plays from Latin into German. The five men, namely Isaak Fröreisen, Johann Georg Wolckenstein, Johann Christoph Stipitius, Isaac Habrecht der Jungere, and Christopher Kernmann, all shared a connection to Strasbourg’s academic institutions. The article first addresses the challenges and possibilities offered by various relevant materials in the Strasbourg municipal archives. The article then turns to presentation of biographical information about the translators. Some of the men enjoyed greater contemporary importance than the others, and as such left a larger archival footprint. Nevertheless, a surprising amount
of information survives even for the most obscure figures.

- by James V H Melton
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- German Studies, German History, History of Religion, Jurgen Habermas

La traduzione italiana completa degli scritti e delle lettere di una delle
figure principali degli anni aurorali della Riforma non necessita alcuna
giustificazione. Essa giunge in un momento di rinnovato interesse nei
confronti degli studi italiani sulla Riforma e in contemporanea al simbolico cinquecentenario della nascita del movimento riformatore. A differenza della precedente parziale traduzione italiana curata da Emidio
Campi, essa comprende l’intero epistolario di Thomas Müntzer, fondamentale per ricostruire gli avvenimenti della sua breve e tormentata vita, e tutti i suoi scritti, fatta eccezione per alcuni frammenti manoscritti, inni e tavole musicali. Essa non si pone come obiettivo quello di sostituire le edizioni critiche e le altre traduzioni esistenti, ma di fornire uno strumento in lingua italiana quanto più completo agli studiosi e lettori, per comprendere e inserire nel suo contesto un personaggio centrale nella storia della Riforma, della cosiddetta «guerra dei contadini», dell’azione rivoluzionaria nell’Europa della prima Età moderna.

- by Michael Hecht
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- Nobility, Saxony (Germany), 18th Century, Early modern Germany
- by Andrew Spicer
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- Urban Geography, Eastern European Studies, Ottoman History, Eastern Europe

Translated and published here for the first time, the travel journal (1683-1696) of Johann Peter Oettinger (1666–1746), documents the young man's journeys through Germany and across the Atlantic. Oettinger describes his work as a surgeon, his role in the purchase and branding of enslaved Africans, the Middle Passage, and his experiences in France and the Netherlands. His descriptions of Amsterdam, Curaçao, St. Thomas, and Suriname, as well as his account of societies along the coast of West Africa, from Mauritania to Gabon, contain rare insights into all aspects of the European trade in African captives in the late seventeenth century. This journeyman’s eyewitness account of all three routes of the triangle trade will be invaluable to scholars of the early modern world on both sides of the Atlantic.

- by Craig Koslofsky and +1
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- Cultural History, African Studies, German History, History of Medicine
- by Jonathan Davies
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- History, Renaissance History, Violence, Early Modern History
- by Cecilia Cristellon
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- Religion, Comparative Religion, History, European History

in: Damals. Das Magazin für Geschichte 7 (2018), S. 45-46.

- by Rebekka von Mallinckrodt
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- Early Modern History, German History, British History, Legal History
- by Richard Hölzl
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- Forestry, German History, Environmental Studies, Environmental History
- by Yaacov Deutsch
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- Jewish - Christian Relations, Early modern Germany, Invective

Moravian sources seldom discuss the status of Africans or West Indian Creoles living as slaves in eighteenth century Germany. These converts and captives provided edifying images of the Brethren’s missionary achievements and their eschatological visions, and the rhetoric of spirituality and communal equality pervading Moravian discourse served to obscure slavery. The result was an ambiguous position: On the one hand, such individuals were accorded a highly visible role of considerable symbolic value. On the other hand, close reading of the sources and semantic analysis of the terminology employed shows that although slavery may have been concealed by church discipline or servitude, it was by no means revoked. Indeed, scattered evidence shows that depending on circumstance, Moravians were ready to claim authority over individuals based on their slave status.

In 1858 the British Museum purchased an album of Ottoman costume paintings that reportedly had at one time belonged to Heinrich Friedrich von Diez, Prussian ambassador to the Ottoman Empire from 1784 to 1790. "Costumes turcs" contains 264 colorful paintings (on paper) produced in Istanbul, in two bound volumes, representing Ottoman dress. According to an English inscription in the album, it was acquired by Diez during his diplomatic residence in Istanbul. An intriguing object in its own right, it has received scant attention from scholars. But was it in fact Diez who brought the paintings forming "Costumes turcs" from Istanbul to Berlin? Material evidence supplied by the album itself suggests that there may well have been a link between "Costumes turcs" and Diez and the Prussian diplomatic milieu. This essay looks in particular at the close relationship between this album and two other costume albums from the late eighteenth century, both now in France. Remarkably all three albums share the same English watermark and were apparently made from the very same batch of paper exported to Istanbul in the 1780s. A comparison of the quite different contents, image sequences, and thematic emphases of the three albums reveals the unusually elaborate and even official aspect of "Costumes turcs," befitting an honorific object. The dating of the paper, combined with the German origin of the leather binding and the use of paper for the binding from a mill near Berlin, place the book with near certainty in the diplomatic and royal milieu of the Prussian capital in the late eighteenth century.

A recently discovered political and legal treatise, Antineutralidad (1640), has been attracting attention in scholarship. This paper extensively scrutinizes the dating and authorship of the text. Sources found in several European archives have made it possible to establish with certainty the authorship of Diego Saavedra Fajardo and the precise period in which Antineutralidad was written (between January and March 1640). This determination is backed by a comparative analysis of early modern texts. Lastly, explorations based on themes and inner logic reveal highly sophisticated and superior planning, argumentation, structural cohesion and innovation, qualities which ennabled the author to create an overarching framework to defend the House of Austria, including key German and European political and legal themes, integrated and fused with both Spanish Habsburg and Christian universalist thinking.

Witches’ Sabbath offers an overload of the emblematic characteristics which were attributed to witches during the early modern period, underpinned by the complete nudity of the witches. Naked witches were not often depicted in the illustrations of respectable, cautionary literary works concerning witches, hence this artistic choice on Baldung's part is a rather innovatory. Interestingly only a year after the unveiling of Witches' Sabbath in 1510, Die Emeis - which preocuppied itself with the Lenten sermons of Johann Geiler von Kaysersberg - was published in Strasbourg similarly depicting naked witches. Although we cannot say whether the inclusion of naked witches in Die Emeis was solely the result of Baldung’s depiction, it is very likely that Geiler would have been familiar with Baldung's work due to its popularity and this woodcut could have indeed influenced his own opinions and artistic choices. Whether Baldung intended his woodcut to not only reflect a “real-life” representation of witches but, more importantly, influence how they would be depicted by their persecutors in the future is debatable. Much of the debate surrounding this piece centres on this point: was it Baldung's intention to realistically depict witches or should Baldung’s work be viewed as satirical. Either way, there is much that this woodcut can tell us about what those who genuinely believed in the existence of witches and the way fear of witchcraft was constructed for public consumption.

- by Guadalupe Morales Gómez
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- Art History, Early Modern History, German History, Early Modern Europe

This paper originally appeared in Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science in 1996. It concerns Tycho Brahe's attempts to grapple with the place of scriptural texts in his emerging cosmology. The substance of this paper is also chapter three of my book God's Two Books: Copernican Cosmology and Biblical Interpretation in Early Modern Science.

- by Kenneth J Howell
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- History of Religion, History of Science, Early modern Germany, Cosmology

Joseph Furttenbach the Elder (1591-1667) was a Swabian architect, scenographer and engineer as well as a collector and prolific writer. During his youth he spent twelve years in Italy, absolving a mercantile apprenticeship in Milan and Genoa. His interests in arts and techniques lead him to undertake extensive travels across the peninsula: in Florence he even met Galileo Galilei. Back in Swabia, he settled down as a magistrate and merchant in the imperial city of Ulm. Thanks to his cabinet of curiosities and his numerous treatises, during decades he played an important role in the transfer of Italian Renaissance and Baroque culture to the Holy Roman Empire. Kaspar von Greyerz, Kim Siebenhüner and Roberto Zaugg have published a critical edition of Joseph Furttenbach's diary (Lebenslauff, 1652-1664): an autobiographical text which provides fascinating insights into the daily life of a pious Lutheran, a member of the urban elite and a renowned scholar of seventeenth-century Germany.

In consultation with the publisher (Springer), I here provide the appendices of the book (authored together with Daniel Bellingradt) Magical Manuscripts in Early Modern Europe. The Clandestine Trade in Illegal Book Collections, [New Directions in Book History], Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan 2017. The appendices include a critical edition of the Leipzig 'catalogus rariorum manuscriptorum' from 1710 (which includes content analyses of all available manuscripts) and four images of the original catalogue.

- by Bernd-Christian Otto and +1
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- Religion, Comparative Religion, 17th Century & Early Modern Philosophy, Early Modern History
- by Peter Paccione
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- Absolutism, Parliamentary History, Early modern Germany, Constitutional History

This thesis focuses on themes of place and war in the development of ghostlore in Early Modern Protestant Germany and England. It reconstructs an enchanted world, one where ghosts and spirits were not tied down to simple Catholic or Protestant tropes but were more multifaceted than previous studies have shown. Stressing continuities between the medieval period and what followed, it shows how ghosts continued to embody anxieties of place, experience and morality. Emphasising the importance of place within legend telling and ghost stories, it recreates a landscape of memory whose bounds, both physical and moral, were patrolled by spirits. Looking at war, we see how the intense experience of conflict and its aftermath were negotiated through spirit tropes, how these lessons were applied to wider society’s morality and how war was a catalyst for ghost belief.
It shows how Protestants, like Catholics before them, had attempted to appropriate and impose order upon these spirits, places and experiences. It shows how Protestantism not only competed with Catholic teachings on spirits but also confronted more atavistic models of spirit belief with varying degrees of success. A key current throughout the thesis is whereas theologians argued an overarching theory of the supernatural, popular belief, on the other hand, was held in bundle form. Therefore, it justifies a closer look at how spirits operated in certain environments and experiences.
This thesis complements existing English studies on spirits and introduces a German ghostlore largely unknown to the British reader. By a deep reading of contemporary ghost stories, set in the place and describing the experience of haunting, we can see the relevance these tales embodied in the moralities they contained, the bounds they set and the proofs they encapsulated.

- by Aidan O'Lynn
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- Folklore, Early Modern History, Ghosts, Cultural History Of Ghosts

While the economic involvement of early modern Germany in slavery and the slave trade is increasingly receiving attention, the direct participation of Germans in human trafficking remains a blind spot in historiography. This edited volume focuses on practices of enslavement taking place within German territories in the early modern period as well as on the people of African, Asian, and Native American descent caught up in them.

- by Rebekka von Mallinckrodt and +2
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- Early Modern History, German History, History of Slavery, Human Trafficking

Based on a synthesis of the empirical scholarship on England and Germany, this paper demonstrates that in both regions, rural socio-economic developments c.1200–c.1800 are similar: this period witnesses the rise to numerical predominance and growing economic significance of the ‘sub-peasant classes’, which had a growing impact on the market as a result of their increasing market dependence, and from which towards the end of the period a rural proletariat emerged. Against the influential theory of Robert Brenner, it is argued that the period c.1200–c.1400 cannot really be categorized as ‘feudal’ according to Brenner’s definition; and ‘agrarian capitalism’ does not adequately describe the socio-economic system that obtained by the end of the sixteenth century. A genuine transition to capitalism is only evident from after c.1750, and can be found in Germany as well as in England; it is predicated both on ideological shifts, and the evolution of the rural proletariat, which is only found in large numbers by or after c.1800.

- by Shami Ghosh
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- Medieval History, Consumers & Consumption, German History, Agrarian Studies

The article addresses the genesis and visualization of the capstone image to Kepler's polyhedral hypothesis of the planetary intervals from his first major work, Mysterium Cosmographicum (1596). The contention is that the famous Tabula III was directed less by Kepler than it was an initiative spearheaded by Georg Gruppenbach, the printer of Mysterium, and Kepler's mentor Michael Mäistlin, who sought to produce a marketable broadsheet that would appeal to the contemporary German fashion for illustrations of polyhedral geometry. More generally, the article seeks to redefine the key role played by the printing workshop and the decorative arts in the theory's inception and ultimate graphic manifestation.

- by Noam Andrews
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- Renaissance Studies, History of Science, History of Astronomy, Johannes Kepler
- by Jay R Berkovitz
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- Jewish Law, Early Modern History, Jewish History, Modern Germany

This paper looks at the evolution of the image of the Turk in the Germanies throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. While scholars have argued that the conquest of Constantinople in 1453 and the Siege of Vienna in 1683 were the main turning points in the German representation of the Turk, I argue that Suleyman's siege of Vienna in 1529 was the second major event that altered German perceptions and fears of the Ottoman Turk.

- by Samantha Goodrich
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- European History, Ottoman History, German History, Seventeenth Century

Cet article se veut un outil précis et fouillé à l’usage des chercheurs souhaitant approfondir le domaine de la petite guerre et des troupes légères (mise à jour, 2005).
Depuis un article d’André Martel paru dans la « Revue Historique » en 1971, la communauté des historiens militaires en France n’a cessé périodiquement de souligner jusqu’à nos jours – avec des approches actualisées – le renouveau de cette histoire militaire. L’intérêt pour la petite guerre s’inscrit dans ce mouvement. Il a été porté aussi par la réalité de beaucoup des conflits d’aujourd’hui, dits « de basse intensité », dans lesquels la tactique des troupes légères d’autrefois, alternative à la bataille, trouve son avatar contemporain. L’article attire d’abord l’attention sur la plus ou moins grande pertinence de l’emploi de l’expression de « petite guerre » dans l’historiographie, en français, en allemand et en anglais. Il procède ensuite à la généalogie de l’étude de la petite guerre à l’époque moderne (XVIe - XVIIIe siècles), en France et dans les mondes anglo-saxon et germanique. Il pointe enfin le problème du cloisonnement des travaux, entre les périodes historiques comme d’un pays à l’autre.

This paper surveys alternative approaches to European serfdom in the light of the evidence for early modern Germany. Traditional ‘manorial dominance’ views prove to be inconsistent with micro-studies of serf decision-making. But nor does the evidence support ‘revisionist’ views which argue that peasant unfreedom was rare, serf choices largely unconstrained, and serfdom harmless for economic growth. The paper proposes an ‘institutional’ approach that analyzes serfdom in terms of the entire framework of constraints within which rural people made decisions. It applies this approach to three key elements of German serfdom: the manor, the community, and the state.

- by Marco Heiles
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- Renaissance Humanism, Monsters and Monster Theory, Early modern Germany

In recent years an ever-growing number of studies has highlighted the importance of mobility for transnational exchange, in political, economic, social, and cultural terms. This has had a significant impact on the field of early modern studies. This conference builds on this body of work, but zooms in on one particular aspect: the continuous interaction that took place on an everyday basis between foreign travelers and Italy’s local population in the early modern period. Foreign travelers – defined here in a broad sense as everyone who traveled to Italy for a finite amount of time, including for example merchants, diplomats, pilgrims, mercenaries, artists, and artisans – interacted with a variety of local inhabitants, ranging from innkeepers to government officials, and from local clergy to salesmen. From a geographical perspective the conference focuses on people traveling to cities and regions across the Italian peninsula, and coming from around the Mediterranean Basin, Northern Europe, East Africa, and East Asia. By bringing together scholars who work on a geographically and socially wide range of topics, the conference aims to contribute to our understanding of the dynamics of mobility and transnational dialogue in early modern Italy.

- by Sandra Toffolo and +1
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- Renaissance History, Early Modern History, Mobility/Mobilities, Early Modern Portuguese History

An important component of the expansionist processes of Europe in the 15th to 17th
centuries was the emergence of a global economic system centered on Western Europe. In
the background of this spectacular geographical, power-political and economic expansion
it is possible to follow constantly the development of early capitalist structures. In order to
understand these complex transformational tendencies, it is necessary to deal in detail with
the practical questions of trade and credit in the late middle ages and the early modern era.
The predominant form of commercial activity was the enterprising company, which had
developed from trading companies based on family relations.
The present study examines the personnel and leadership structure of these enterprising
companies, as well as the decision making mechanisms on the high and middle levels. It pays
considerable attention to the network of factors. This latter phenomenon raises important
questions from several aspects. The factorial system, which covered the whole of Europe, can
be interpreted – adopting partly the methods and conceptual vocabulary of economic network
research – either as an intra-company functional network, or as an early medieval model of
inter-company fi nancial network. The study thus aims at putting the analysis of classical
themes of economic history on a new methodological footing, putting to use that part of
historical network research which is relevant from its particular point of view.

- by Attila Tózsa-Rigó
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- Economic History, Early Modern History, Early Modern Europe, Social History

This article explores the entanglement of the discourse of foolishness and the medial conditions of print in Sebastian Brant’s Ship of Fools (1494). To enable the reader to recognize his/her foolishness reflected in the “mirror” of the printed page, Brant would have to shepherd the reader into the book, constructing the very reader that his printed text would, he hoped, transform. This article triangulates the discourse of foolishness, the reader, and the medium of print in order to describe certain pragmatic, structural, and thematic dimensions that have historically troubled scholars. Exploring the typographical form brings us one step closer to this goal, yet print alone does not provide an unequivocal key to understanding the relationship between discourse, mediality, and reception. The article therefore situates the print medium within the early modern convergence culture that the work itself thematizes. It first examines contemporary mirror technology in order to describe Brant’s transformation of the mirror metaphor and how exactly The Ship of Fools “mirrors.” It then considers linear perspective as a model for how the work functions to engage the reader, repositioning him/her in the new media and moral landscape of the early modern period.

- by Ling-Wei Kung
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- Philology, Intellectual History, Japanese Studies, Qing Dynasty (Ch'ing Dynasty)